Yascha Mounk: Germany's Not That Sorry Anymore

Yascha Mounk, the founding editor of the Utopian, is a political theorist at Harvard University. He is working on a book about German-Jewish relations since 1945.

...To explain Germany's response to the crisis we must start from the fact that the country has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last 20 years. In the postwar era, leaders from Konrad Adenauer to Willy Brandt realized that, for Germany to be readmitted to the fellowship of civilized nations, it had to atone for the recent past. Germany thus paid reparations to Israel, concluded peace treaties with its eastern neighbors, and, above all, entered an unwavering alliance with former foes like Britain, France, and the United States.

But the contrite Germany of the postwar era has been long gone. Since Germany's reunification, the need to atone for Auschwitz has been replaced by the desire to draw a definitive finish line underneath irksome talk of the Third Reich.

The first decisive step in this direction was taken in 1998 by Martin Walser, a famous novelist, when he called Auschwitz a "moral baseball bat" wielded by sinister outsiders intent on harming Germany's interests. Germany's assembled political and cultural elite feted Walser's speech with standing ovations.

The call for a finish line went on to shape Germany's foreign policy. In 2002, struggling with a difficult reelection campaign, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder decided to exploit his opposition to the Iraq war for electoral gain. His country, he promised, would no longer be America's lapdog; instead, it would go the "German way." Schröder unexpectedly won reelection....